Chris Beams: [01:24:04.19] Yeah, for sure. And some percentage are actually out and out scams, right? I think a lot of people are too quick to say “Oh, it’s just all scams”, or something like that. Mostly, the things that you run into, I think it’s still safe to say, are actually well-intentioned people saying “Hey, I’ve got a bright idea. I’ve got some sort of notion of a kind of economics that I can add into this application, that I can sort of tokenize it, and that I can build a legitimate way to fund the development of this project. People will hold this token and pay for using the application with the token” or whatever different kind of model.

So there’s hours and hours that we could talk about on all of those models, right? But what Bisq is doing is something if not unique, very unusual, by comparison, to this kind of norm that we’ve been seeing in this space. Basically, one thing that makes it unusual is that Bisq is working, running software. We’ve actually built the system, it’s out there, it works, people use it, and people are happy to pay to use it.

When people initiate a trade, both on the maker side and the taker side (both counterparties), they pay a fee into Bisq, in Bitcoin; that fee goes to the arbitrators today. I’m one of those arbitrators, the founder of Bisq is one of the arbitrators. So people are willing to pay to use this application in this network, because it’s valuable to them to be able to trade. Same reason people pay a fee on a centralized exchange.

So that works to a degree, in terms of economically incentivizing the development of the application. That can help pay the bills and so on, if you will, but it doesn’t scale very well with regard to getting that JavaFX UI person to come and contribute that chart implementation, or fix that bug, or whatever it is. That’s where this idea of a DAO comes in.

What we’re up to here and what we’re rolling out is a token; we added a token into the sort of larger Bisq system, and that token is actually something based on Bitcoin. This is something that is not a new idea, but not a lot of people do - it’s called a colored coin. What that means is that each BSQ token (we actually call the token Bisq as well, but its ticker symbol would be BSQ) is actually backed by a small fraction of a Bitcoin, a thousand Satoshis, where a Satoshi is one one-hundred-millionth of a Bitcoin. So 1,000 of those, which is a very, very small amount of Bitcoin, actually backs this coin.
What this means is that – and before I get too much into the details of what BSQ is, what can you do with it? Well, we haven’t launched it yet, and I can get into the details of the roadmap later, but when it’s fully functional, what people will be able to do is buy BSQ, trade for BSQ on the Bisq exchange - so they might trade Bitcoin for it - and with that BSQ they’ll be able to pay their trading fees at a lower rate than they would pay for it in Bitcoin. So it’ll be a cost-savings to them, they’ll be able to do more trades more cheaply when they pay for them in BSQ.

[01:28:04.27] Okay, so what? What good does that do? Well, on the other side, and getting back to the original question you asked, we wanna bring people in, have more people contribute, we wanna fully decentralized the operation and maintenance and development of the whole network and the application and so on. So this is the second role of the BSQ token.

The first role is that you can pay to use the application with it, so it’s a kind of access token in that way. The second utility that it has is that you can be paid in it for the work that you do for Bisq or on Bisq. Somebody comes along and implements the chart that we were just talking about - they would at the end of that month period issue what we call a compensation request, and fundamentally that’s gonna be a document saying “Hey, I did this work.” It might be a link to a pull request, or one or more pull requests or commits, something like that that says “Hey, I contributed a chart and it’s merged. That took me this much time, and this is my market rates, what I usually get paid.” Again, just sort of thinking in the units of currency that we denominate our lives in, “Hey, this was $1,000 worth of work for me”, and then they would look at what the market price of BSQ is, and they would issue a compensation request for that amount of BSQ.

What happens is then DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) votes on his compensation request and anybody else’s requests that were issued during that period, and they’re voting in the affirmative or negative - “Yes, we’re going to pay for that work”, “No, we’re not.” And people don’t have any guarantee.

Brendan Eich: The story of my life. I was a Unix kernel hacker at Silicon Graphics before I ended up at Netscape, and I always worked on platform code… I think you see - it’s pretty explicit now - open fintech through the Symphony Foundation and other things… You see a lot of companies realize that open source is better for quality assurance, recruiting, lots of things that traditionally they would have to pay for themselves, so they can share the cost of platform code, or what Georgios Kontaxis calls evolutionary kernel code. This is the sort of stable code that’s conserved like the best DNA in a population. It’s like the TCP/IP or JavaScript - once you stabilize it, everybody can build huge systems above, and sometimes even below it. You can have multiple link layers and go from Ethernet being 10 Mbps on copper, all the way up to fiber (metropolitan Ethernet or whatever ATM cells) and still have this TCP/IP in the middle, and sure, IPv6, but it’s not really taking over, and it’s all evolutionary. JavaScript ES6, here we go again!

The platform code, the evolutionary kernel code that’s sort of “the commons” in the best sense of the word, is a cost center. When I was at Silicon Graphics, as I developed hot, killer graphics, workstations and then high-end multi-processors and low-end desktop graphics workstation machines, eventually to be killed by the PC and the GPU in the ’90s, the kernel group that I worked in and the network software group got kicked around. It was a cost center, it was an albatross, or else it was a source of talent for building out something important for the multiprocessor business. So they got kicked from the “hot product” group to the “not hot product” group and back. I think it even got divisionalized a little bit, not fully forked. HP did the same thing.

I see a pattern here, where open source is serving the commons, it’s not serving the differentiated, risky or for-profit innovation, that for better or worse some of that stuff stays proprietary. But anything that starts to become a platform, starts to become a cost center and needs to have its costs shared if it’s of interest to many other players. And how do you fund that? I wouldn’t say it’s exactly like publishers, because publishers often are for-profit. But not always - Dow Jones was a long-time family-owned and subsidized… In some ways we need Carlos Slim and Jeff Bezos to prop up the nation’s number one and two papers of record, right?

[01:00:22.27] Newspapers have been in a decades-long decline, and they always relied on advertising and subscriptions, and subscriptions never paid for the whole thing; they were always a minority of the revenue needed to run a newspaper business, even back in the heyday, the golden age of newspapers. Because people would subscribe, and there was some revenue you made there, but advertising paid the bulk of it, and that’s still true.

The way I look at this is not to say “We must have advertising. Advertising is always good.” There was a TV executive I heard about in the ‘50s who said, “It’s inconceivable that television will ever be other than free and advertising-supported”, and of course we have Netflix now, so never say never. Maybe the Brave donation model, in some future frictionless micro-donation, micro-payment, micro-royalty world will suffice. We still have free television with ads for sure, even with Netflix. But if you look at how costs are covered, you have to look at what’s happening today. If 70 billion is spent on ads in the U.S. (I think this year, or maybe it was last year), and Facebook and Google are taking a lot of it (they’re taking 80%) and the increment in spending from last year - maybe it went from 60 to 70 - of that 10 billion increment they’re 90%, that’s not leaving a lot for the publishers. And if you look at how the publishers do their ad businesses, they have to pay if they sell direct ad space. If they do indirect, they’re at the mercy of malware, like I said, but they’re also getting far less, because there’s so many people in the middle, cutting out from the pie; by the time the pie gets from the marketing side to the publisher, there’s very little left - 35-40% or less.

Still, that’s a lot of money. That’s billions of dollars a year, and these companies need to get it, so how would you go about replacing that? Assume for a moment things need to be replaced as is, that we won’t get a better model, we won’t find fusion energy, like Sam Altman thinks would make electricity free - I kind of doubt that - but ceteris paribus (all else equal), how would you replace that 70 billion? I think about that a lot. First of all, I think a lot of it is wasted on ads that never are viewed. This is the big scandal that’s been breaking for the last year or so, thanks to my friends at White Ops Security; there was another group whose acronym I’m forgetting - ANA I think, that did a study that showed there was a lot of fraud and kickback nonsense going on…

[01:02:56.04] A lot of ads aren’t being viewed. Facebook recently announced that its video ad metrics were off, way high from what they actually were. And they were charging accordingly, so people are kind of mad about this. But we have computers, we have smartphones; we could theoretically do a very private platform that measures what you’re interested in without giving away your data profile or your privacy, and matches valuable opportunities to you and give you a cut. That makes me think there’s a way to fund the web even if it’s not a commons. But certainly, for things like a publisher site that is more of a commons - obviously, Wikipedia is an example, but there are others - or all the open source software that everybody wants to share the cost of, because it is a cost centre, it is even an evolutionary kernel in some sense, and it has to be sustained by everybody who’s chipping in. I think there are ways to fund it, it’s just we haven’t found the ways to do it. That’s why Brave’s doing Bitcoin under the hood. It’s not because we love Bitcoin; we don’t want everyone to learn about Bitcoin. We do not intend people to have to become Bitcoin gurus. We haven’t announced yet, we’re doing a deal where you can easily just trust us with your credit card to do a recurring small charge to get Bitcoins; you don’t have to think about it at all. Currently, the way you fund your Brave wallet while we’re doing this Brave payments, beta is with Coinbase (we’ve partnered with Coinbase), but you still have to think a little bit about Bitcoin. And the publisher side, they’re getting Bitcoin out; we’re gonna make that easy to get fiat [currency] out.

We’d like to use something like Bitcoin though because we think there’s a future where you have a frictionless system - no interchange charge, none of the hidden charges that are associated with the credit cards where fraud sticks the merchant with the overhead or the cost of having funds clawed back to the bank. The interchange charge is like 2,15% or something (it varies), but the hidden cost of fraud is high, and a lot of merchants have to eat it. It’s not a good deal for them, especially the small businesses.

[01:04:57.10] So I think there’s something coming to the web in terms of frictionless payments, whether it’s Bitcoin, or Ethereum classic, or son of daughter of redhead’s stepchild of both… There’s something coming there, and the important properties are the permissionless property, no intermediary, frictionless property… Ideally, it would be anonymous and capable of doing micro transactions with Bitcoin as not currently. But that’s why Brave has this Brave payment solution - we solve that ahead of some next-generation solution that is coming to Bitcoin. And we want to, again, make it just work with your native fiat currency. If that happens, then I think it will be easier to micro-tip, micro-donate, have micro royalties.

Think about the Ted Nelson’s project Xanadu vision, and now think about VR if it ever takes off, or AR, because it really should be in our sunglasses. In ten years it probably will be, then all the great stuff creative people build for the augmented or virtual world - you can’t really DRM it. It’s a shared world, there’s too many eyeballs to ray trace and path trace to. You can’t say, “These are encrypted pixels and you cannot touch them, or we’ll put you in jail under the DMCA.”

All your models and your texture art - they’re gonna be out there, just like they were in Second Life. How do you protect that stuff? Well, you can watermark it; that’s a traditional method, it goes back to real-world paintings and documents. That is more of an identification system for prosecuting gross copyright violations after the fact. What if you could just have automatic micro royalties, like

Ted Nelson envisioned? People are looking at or using, or borrowing, or creative-commons-ing, meshing up some bit of art - there’s a micro royalty associated to the artist. That can be automated too, and that’s another thing that I think you can do with cryptocurrencies if you do them right. That should be part of the web standard, future AR web. I’ll pause there because I’ve said a lot, but you can see that there’s a big vision here, and I hope it’s exciting to everybody because it goes way beyond just browsers.

Adam Stacoviak: You hired a bunch more people… And I think the known unknown thing is the bike world blew up in terms of a good thing during the pandemic. Everybody was like, “If all I can do is go outside, I might as well ride a bike.” And so bikes were sold out everywhere, and all these different things… And so now I feel like the industry got hot as a result of the pandemic, but now the love for those – like, that was one thing I could see… We’re in the tech business; you saw the Zoom stock go way up, and you saw Tesla’s stock go way up. And the stock market, in some ways, is a factor of how well the business is going etc. A lot of tech stocks, even Bitcoin went to $60,000 per Bitcoin - all these things blew up during the pandemic and went up, and then they sort of came back down in norms again. You see Square trading at lower than $100. For example Tesla I think is like $600 or maybe $800 bucks per share, in comparison to where they were… But I think the fire that was stoked for the bike world is still there, the passion is still there. Can you speak to maybe the blessing in disguise, I suppose, for the bike world? It was already on track to be popular, but the pandemic sort of stoked it, and it seems like the desire and passion for bikes hasn’t changed as a result of going back to normal.

Anna Derbakova: Yeah, that’s the basic concept; that’s still there, because in Bitcoin you’re exchanging essentially value, right? You would be exchanging value of Bitcoin, but in Ethereum you could be exchanging some kind of coin, but you could also be exchanging an asset, because they have the idea of a smart contract. But the idea is it’s a different type of blockchain, it’s a different implementation, and Hyperledger also is slightly different. But who owns it? That’s a good question. I mean, there’s not gonna be one blockchain to rule them all. They are gonna be different, and I think that’s a very good forward-looking question, because then people will wonder, “If we have this blockchain here for this group of banks, and this blockchain here for supply chain, if they ever need to interoperate, or something of as far as transferring records from one to the other, what are we gonna do?”

So I think that’s a question that’s definitely gonna need to be explored fairly soon. If you have two different blockchains with different consensus algorithms, how do you deal with that? These questions… I’m not sure if IBM, for example, is researching anything into that - at least I’m not directly involved in it - but if it doesn’t come up soon, it will in the very near future.

José Valim: No, not really, in the sense that I consider myself very lucky, very fortunate, or whatever; or blessed, however you want to say it. I’m not being overconfident here, but more like thankful that I think whatever happens to me, it’s going to be fine. I truly believe that what’s going to make Elixir survive is the community, more than whatever technological changes… Unless there’s something very drastic.

[52:18] I talked to my father about this, about investments. So when Bitcoin wasn’t that crazy, and then my father is like “Oh, have you heard about this thing, that if you put your money there, people got this huge return?” And then I always told him “Father, if we got to know about it, it’s because it’s too late.” Or if something happens, it’s like “Oh, father, if something happens, it’s because – if something goes this bad, it’s because it’s going to be bad for everybody. So don’t try to fight it.”

So again, unless there’s a very major change, I think I’ll be fine. So I’m not worried about me, in the sense I always think more about – it’s more about ideals. Again, I like to say, well, me 10 years ago - that’s where my trepidation is if things go closed source… And those things, they happen by – we don’t see the results. I think another polemic topic about this, it’s like “Hey, I use Chrome. As soon as Chrome came out, I immediately –” Today I don’t use Chrome anymore. But as soon as Chrome came out, I immediately swapped to Chrome. And if I had known that this would lead to a point where Google is in this position where it has a lot of control over the browser, over the web, and over how we use the internet, 10 years ago I would probably not have used Chrome, if I could have seen it. So I think that’s where my trepidation comes from, of things being closed source. The developer experience…

Another example today – Elixir was the first programming language that GitHub had the new code navigation things that were provided by the community. So there were some programming languages, and there still are, where they have very good navigation and exploration on GitHub UI. And the path for that, to get that feature, to get that behavior was - and I’m very thankful that the GitHub team, they discussed with us and allowed us to do that… But that’s closed source. And GitHub plays a major role over how developers use.

So it all comes back to this idea of if you want to provide a good experience for your users, how much of that is behind something closed source that you have no control, and you are depending on somebody paying attention to you, or you having a contact, or me having a name, because I was very active in the Rails community that GitHub uses like 10 years ago? Those are the things that – but I feel lucky, but it worries me. How much is being closed? How much is going to be out of our control? And then the trepidation, I guess, is “What does that matter for the small José out there, who wants to start building his thing today, and they won’t be able to?”

José Valim: No, not really, in the sense that I consider myself very lucky, very fortunate, or whatever; or blessed, however you want to say it. I’m not being overconfident here, but more like thankful that I think whatever happens to me, it’s going to be fine. I truly believe that what’s going to make Elixir survive is the community, more than whatever technological changes… Unless there’s something very drastic.

[01:34:11.15] I talked to my father about this, about investments. So when Bitcoin wasn’t that crazy, and then my father is like “Oh, have you heard about this thing, that if you put your money there, people got this huge return?” And then I always told him “Father, if we got to know about it, it’s because it’s too late.” Or if something happens, it’s like “Oh, father, if something happens, it’s because – if something goes this bad, it’s because it’s going to be bad for everybody. So don’t try to fight it.”

So again, unless there’s a very major change, I think I’ll be fine. So I’m not worried about me, in the sense I always think more about – it’s more about ideals. Again, I like to say, well, me 10 years ago - that’s where my trepidation is if things go closed source… And those things, they happen by – we don’t see the results. I think another polemic topic about this, it’s like “Hey, I use Chrome. As soon as Chrome came out, I immediately –” Today I don’t use Chrome anymore. But as soon as Chrome came out, I immediately swapped to Chrome. And if I had known that this would lead to a point where Google is in this position where it has a lot of control over the browser, over the web, and over how we use the internet, 10 years ago I would probably not have used Chrome, if I could have seen it. So I think that’s where my trepidation comes from, of things being closed source. The developer experience…

Another example today – Elixir was the first programming language that GitHub had the new code navigation things that were provided by the community. So there were some programming languages, and there still are, where they have very good navigation and exploration on GitHub UI. And the path for that, to get that feature, to get that behavior was - and I’m very thankful that the GitHub team, they discussed with us and allowed us to do that… But that’s called source. And GitHub plays a major role over how developers use.

So it all comes back to this idea of if you want to provide a good experience for your users, how much of that is behind something closed source that you have no control, and you are depending on somebody paying attention to you, or you having a contact, or me having a name, because I was very active in the Rails community that GitHub uses like 10 years ago? Those are the things that – but I feel lucky, but it worries me. How much is being closed? How much is going to be out of our control? And then the trepidation, I guess, is “What does that matter for the small José out there, who wants to start building his thing today, and they won’t be able to?”

Eric Berry: But I wasn’t. I wasn’t because it didn’t make sense to completely shut it off. I did shut down the platform, I stopped tracking… But I still had developers who trusted me and relied on me to help them get funding. And I had a good friend, Mike Smith, who I believe you know, over at Rollbar, who’s now at GitPrime. I asked him, I said “Are you willing to stick with me? What I can do is you keep providing funding for all of these top-performing sites” – and he looks at them as top-performing, I look at them as needing the most funding. I said “Will you continue to provide funding for them, and I will just take a 15% cut, and that will essentially make it so that we can still do the tracking”, as we were still running it through a tracker… But I didn’t need any of the money. The money was literally just to help the server run. He said, “Absolutely.” He had no issue with that.

So in December I paid out all the remaining money to all of the people that I owed money to, which came to almost $5,000, and then I had an extra thousand dollars of nickles and dimes for all of the other developers that didn’t make enough money to receive that payout, so I made a lump sum donation of $1,000 to the A21 organization for fighting human trafficking. There’s a blog post listing every single developer that participated as a donor in that donation… Because it wasn’t my money; I didn’t consider it my money and I didn’t want it. So in December I talked to a buddy of mine named Freddie Shelton, and I asked him, I said “Hey, are you interested in Code Sponsor? I’ve got all these contracts set up, I’ve got Mike here… Would you like to take it over?” “Sure, absolutely.” So he did, and he kept it going for a month, all the way through early January.

In that time, I was kind of going through this point in my life where I hate my job, I need to find purpose… I found true purpose in funding open source, but I need to be able to go somewhere that I can do that and get paid for it… And that’s what I did.

[36:15] Over the course of about three months, I’ve been talking to Kevin Owocki, who is the CEO and founder of Gitcoin. Gitcoin is a product that helps developers get paid to contribute to open source funding through bounties. We became friends over the months and he offered me a job to come work at Gitcoin, which I accepted.

Once I got to Gitcoin, I thought “I wonder if I can just pick up where I left off and bring Code Sponsor back in.” So I reached out to Freddie, I said “How’s it going?”, I said “Would you be willing to sell me back the company?” and he did. I gave him some money for the company, and then I brought it in as just my contribution to Gitcoin… Just “Here’s me, here’s what I can bring to the table. I don’t want any money for it.” They paid a few of the expenses that I had for the product, but all in all it was like “Code Sponsor joins Gitcoin as sister companies, but they’re basically one company now”, because we’re all getting our paychecks from the same company, and all that stuff. But my role at that point became “Make this work. Help people through ethical advertising.”

Jerod Santo: Very cool. Well, I think it’s a very apt comparison then. Let me give you a little bit of the lay of the land from Adam and my perspective, as well as our listeners, what I would expect in terms of developer knowledge, what we’ve covered on the show, and then we’ll have you walk through – because one of the reasons why we have you on is to a) understand what Truffle offers, but also using Truffle as a lens, learning what all it takes to build these decentralized applications and what all the moving parts are, because as we’ve said, it’s all kind of new and different, and that means it’s also kind of intimidating and maybe difficult to approach.

[16:25] So we’ve covered Ethereum conceptually… Way back in the day we’ve had Gavin Wood on the show; we had shows about blockchains, and Hyperledger, Bitcoin, distributed exchanges… We had shows about the concepts around blockchains, cryptocurrencies, what have you - Ethereum specifically, we’ve covered smart contracts both generically and a little bit specifically with regard to Gitcoin, which was our most recent show. And with Gitcoin, we talked a little bit about how that application specifically works with regards to MetaMask, and Web3, and those kinds of things.

That being said, from a developer’s perspective, building an Ethereum-based application all the way through, even after myself having all these conversations, is still kind of a black box… So why don’t you give us the high level of all the parts that are involved, and then we’ll kind of dive into the specific regions?

Gavin Wood: I think some parallels can be drawn to the early internet, where it was sort of slightly scary to send payment information over the internet. I remember back in ‘98, it was still relatively commonplace, I was still being asked to pass my credit card information via email. It’s like, “Well, I don’t really want to do that… That’s incredibly insecure.” SSL was still a fairly new thing, to the point that the eCommerce sites often didn’t have it implemented.

We’re gonna have to go through the same phase with Ethereum. There’s gonna be an early teething stage where things don’t operate quite as you expect. Either the Ethereum technology itself doesn’t - luckily, we haven’t had any of those bugs yet, but in principle it could happen; it is a nascent technology. It happened with Bitcoin, so I wouldn’t rule it out, though we have taken very particular steps to avoid that, in particular multiple implementations and a formal specification.

The second thing that could happen is just the economic foundation behind the smooth running of the Ethereum at work gets a little afraid, and that’s pretty much what happened with the DAO. The fact it forked owed to the fact that there was such a large contingent of value that people wanted to save, that were also people who maintained the Ethereum network.

[50:05] I think as the network matures, that’s gonna be much less likely to happen, quite simply because the value of Ethereum is going to disperse as more and more people get involved.

Peter Ma: As a hacker, I basically build prototypes a lot, and the entrepreneurs generally follow what the trend is. And the latest trend is blockchain and AI. Blockchain is still really difficult to program, but people get into it because there’s one or two really good applications. They see Bitcoin as one of the things that’s gonna change the world, and all the programmers are starting to study blockchain. And they see self-driving cars, they start seeing this as being deployed in the real world, and they’re like “Okay…” This is a time where you have emerging technology that’s being applied in the real world now, and this is a time for me to invest my time to understand and to execute and to find opportunities within this space.

[16:18] As it happened back with mobile. When mobile started getting into people’s hands, all of a sudden, all of the programmers started jumping on mobile. I jumped in before that, and I remember just being one of the independent Android developers; I was invited to give a talk at TED global. That was really rare, because people didn’t get into it. But as soon as that tipping point has been passed through - we have current applications being deployed in the real world - that’s when the programmers all wanna jump in, and this is where opportunity is.

Brian Behlendorf: The chaos in there potentially could have been a lot less. Now, that’s an idealist speaking, so we have to be careful about that. For consumers it might not look that much different; this is still largely a backend story, but where I think it plays out is – so the idea of Bitcoin wallets really made real for people, like the fact that this is actually a currency - imagine that concept now applied to your health records, or to your land title and car title and other important documents that today you print out, or you probably don’t even have in digital form… They might just be pieces of paper you keep in a filing cabinet, which you hope you remember to grab with you when a forced fire is coming for your house…

Preethi Kasireddy: Yeah, just for the blockchain to scale – it’s just impossible for it to scale if every node needs to process every transaction. So you still need to have a mechanism where even if you shard, it has to be possible for all the nodes to still trust that every transaction is valid, even though they don’t have access to all the transactions. That’s hard, and that’s why it’s been a hard problem to solve.

[42:10] One of the things with Bitcoin’s scalability is Bitcoin also has a blockchain, they have blocks, and they foresaw this problem quite a long back ago (almost three or four years ago). With them, they had two solutions: either increase the size of the block itself, so that you can fit more transactions in a block, and therefore every time a block gets processed, you’re processing more transactions in a second, or another solution was to call SegWit [Segregated Witness] where you basically take the heaviest parts of the transaction and move it to another part of the block that doesn’t necessarily have to be calculated in the actual size of the block, so they can still fit more transactions.

So there’s short-term solutions like that, but in the long-term I definitely think there’s a lot more sophisticated solutions that need to be created, like sharding, as you’re saying.

Another one that I’ve heard of is plasma, which is something Ethereum is researching, where they’re basically using this MapReduce framework to scale the blockchain. Another very interesting one is state channels. State channels is basically saying “Okay, if it’s really hard to process so many transactions in the blockchain, why do we need to process everything on the blockchain? There’s probably certain transactions that we can process off the blockchain, and only the ones we need to process on the blockchain we’ll process on the blockchain.”

Jerod Santo: So, since Bitcoin is back in its bull run… It’s just been a few years in a bear market and then came roaring back from something like $4,000 a year ago, to 60k per coin, and around there today… People are interested once again in this crazy world of cryptocurrencies, and so we thought it’d be fun to explain Bitcoin like you’re five, because it is a difficult thing to explain, difficult to talk about, a lot of ins, a lot of outs, a lot of what-have-yous…

[19:57] The first way I would like to explain this is by stealing a tweet from Theophite on Twitter, which I thought that was a hilarious way to explain Bitcoin… Somebody tweeted out “I still don’t get Bitcoin”, and Theophite replied “Imagine if keeping your [unintelligible 00:20:13.18] for 24/7 produced solved Sudokus you could trade in for heroin.” [laughter] That’s pretty classic, right?

So of course, there’s your bear explanation, and there are lots of downsides with Bitcoin specifically around energy use and whatnot… But there is also some real value to the network. And I’m not gonna explain how Bitcoin works like we’re five, but I thought maybe I’d try to explain why some people think it’s valuable like you’re five… So here we go.

Imagine that you’re playing Monopoly with some friends… And one person decides - maybe they’re the homeowner. Usually house rules… They decide that they’re gonna be both the banker and the rule enforcer. Pretty typical. Everything starts off okay, but then the banker starts doing some things that you don’t appreciate as someone who plays the game. For example, they start injecting new money into the game, but not equally to everyone. Just to themselves and some of their friends.

They change the rules about how much money you get for passing Go, what you can go to jail for and for how long, they create over-the-top transfer fees and laws about who can trade with whom, etc.

Eventually, you and a few other people in the game decide that you want to transact without the banker’s rules, permissions, fees and so on. But you can’t use the Monopoly bucks, because the banker runs that whole system of things. So instead, you start a grouptext on your phones. And each time you wanna transfer money to and from each other, you put that in a text. Maybe you text “I’ll send five Schrute Bucks to Kball.” And then you text that out.

Everyone involved in this new way of sending money is in the grouptext, so that’s how you keep each other honest. Bitcoin is the grouptext. The end. What do you think?

Kevin Owocki: Yeah, and I think the key thing about Gitcoin is it’s a way to get involved in the ecosystem when you’re not exactly sure what your play is. We’ve got a lot of people in there who have corporate jobs that they’re looking to make a next move from, or they’re freelancers who are looking for their next gig, but they recognize that blockchain is this new frontier that could potentially be important… And it’s only one way to do it.

I’m going to the Boulder Blockchain Meetup tonight to nerd out with people in the local community, and there’s gonna be an Ethereum Hackathon out here in Colorado called Eth Denver in the middle of February… And by the way, applications are still open; if this airs before 30th January, applications are still open. But there’s a lot of people in the world who aren’t privileged like I am, and get to just go down the street and go to a blockchain meetup, so by providing an online hangout for people to figure out this ecosystem, I think we’re gonna help people immerse and be successful. That’s what the mission is - to push open source forward and to help people navigate this new ecosystem.

Techno Tim: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. To get the fastest machine, to get the best frame rates, to get the lowest latency. Yeah, it pushed a lot of things forward. But I also feel like, man, that kind of like pigeonholed what a machine is possible of, and everyone optimized probably for cost, to get less lanes, smaller motherboards. It’s been happening over time for a long time. But yeah, it’s crazy to think - like, everything depends on the GPU now, too. No matter what you want to do. I mean, when you think of AI, when you think of Bitcoin, when you think of video rendering, creation… Everything depends on the video card. And everyone’s competing for them, at least with the 5080, I think. The 5080, what NVIDIA did was basically say “No, this one’s specifically for gaming.” They basically gave it gaming performance, like the previous generation for the cost, I think, less than the previous generation, but without the CUDA cores for the ML and AI.

[01:48:03.27] So I think – I mean, I don’t know if it’s the right thing to do, but it was a smart thing to do, for NVIDIA to say “Nah, this one’s for gaming. If you’re going to do AI, this is not the one to get.” I think that that kind of segmented their audience. I wish they would go wider. I wish they would go wider. Say “Hey, here’s the creator edition. Here’s the AI edition”, or Bitcoin edition, whatever. Call it whatever you want. “And here’s the gamer edition.” And then optimize for those things.

Honestly, it’s hard to discern between media creator and gamer, because really, you just need GPU, you need that encoder. You don’t need the 3D aspect, but you need that encoder, and you need video RAM. So you don’t need any – well, the funny thing is you still need some AI capabilities, even for creation today. If you think of Photoshop… When you say remove, or blur, or anything like that. They’ve been doing it for a long time. So that’s offloaded to your GPU if you have one, is to be able to do Gaussian blurs, or blurs, or even replace, or auto select this person, or cut this person out of the photo. So those are still needed, even outside of video, if you’re just doing static art… But yeah, I don’t know. I wish they would – I don’t know. I don’t know what they should do.

Adam Stacoviak: Yeah. No media is safe unless you have a physical copy. It’s like – I don’t know if you’re into Bitcoin at all, but the “Not your keys, not your wallet” kind of situation. Like, “Hey, not your media, not your –” Like, just because you own the discs too, you still have a license to use the disk. You don’t actually own it. But you can; you know, you have way more freedom than streamed, because you can find a way to change where it’s stored at. I don’t think ripping is against the law. Sharing - I’m not sharing my content with you. I’m not torrenting my media library. That’s not at all why I do any of that stuff. It’s really for convenience for me and my family.

[44:01] The experience of swapping out discs is like caveman, right? It’s like trying to create fire with sticks. Why would you do that? Like, if you have homelab sophistication or curiosities, why would you not find a way to run Plex? Why would you not find a way to have a small NAS, and run ZFS? Of course, not Btrfs or anything else, because nothing else exists besides open ZFS. I don’t know about you, Tim, but that’s how I feel… I’m just kidding. I’m not a hater. I do prefer, but I’m not a hater.

Till Schneidereit: In the talk yesterday I made this sort of off-hand joke about stealing your Bitcoin wallet, which of course is based on real world events… And it’s no joke. It’s something that has actually happened. An application that you trust, where you rightfully trust the author of that application, still going behind your back and stealing your money, literally. Well, almost; it’s blockchain. And this probably won’t go away without us doing anything about it.

The way I see it, we can do something about it in two different ways. Either by locking everything down through authority, going through app stores and letting the Apples of this world dictate what you can and cannot consume in terms of applications and media, or by going away from something that is otherwise incredibly helpful, and increases the stability of applications and productivity of developers, and that is code reuse through platforms like npm. Or for Rust we have crates.io, which is very similar.

It’s not scalable to try to review the entire code there for the hundreds of thousands of packages published there all the time and we see that it’s not scalable, because nobody is doing and nobody could possibly do it. So we can give up on this code reuse, or we can say “Well, let’s work on things such that you don’t have to trust all of this code”, and to do that we need proper sandboxing, we need to be able to say “As long as the application can only run in this directory, I don’t actually care about whether it tries to steal my Bitcoin wallet”, because it can’t, and you don’t need to trust it in this regard. For that, we need to bring a sandboxing model that is essentially similar to what the web provides to development outside the web, in a way that still allows these applications to provide the value you want from there, and we’re working on that.

Dmitry Jemerov: [07:55] Yeah. And so probably the main guys responsible for promoting Kotlin were Jake Wharton from Square and Mike Hearn from the Bitcoin community. Essentially, he wrote an article motivating internal for Square why they should start using Kotlin, and then he published it externally and I still find people who are referring to it even today, even though it was published three years ago and it’s not entirely up to date.

Mike Hearn also published an article like “Why Kotlin is my next language”, and it also got lots and lots of quotes and reposts and so on. So I think that was very influential.

Of course, there are many other companies, like for example Christina Lee from Pinterest is advocating Kotlin quite a lot, and the Gradle partnership is also playing a role, the Spring Framework guys are also now excited about Kotlin… So you see lots of interest all around the community.

Jerod Santo: Very cool. Well, if you are not like Suz and lucky enough to get in on the beta yet, I know there’s lots of people still awaiting… Well, while you wait, you can hear from Kyle Daigle all about it. We had him on the Changelog a few backs; I’ll link that up - “GitHub Actions is the next big thing.” We go deep into that, and he even answers my question about Bitcoin mining… So they have a response to the leeches out there who want to have the free compute power. So listen to that in the meantime, and hopefully we’ll all get in that beta soon. Or hopefully it’ll come out of beta and we can all start using it.

I’m excited for the community-shared workflows to start flowing towards my repo, so I don’t have to write very much code, and I can get all the benefit. That’s just kind of the lazy, selfish guy that I am.

Alright, thanks, Suz. Chris, you’re up. How about some shout-outs from you?

Richard Moot: It’s kind of funky, because I think most people think of it as separate companies. And I think they were kind of operated functionally that way… But as far as I’ve understood this, it’s all Block. And each one of these other things are brands that are part of Block. But I joined before we became block, so it’s I still have this thing burned in my brain that I work for Square … Recently that’s changed a little bit, so I work on all Block products, doing developer relations now.

So yeah the relationship is each one of these divisions kind of focused on a different audience in the economy. Square is focused on businesses, and trying to run small businesses, midsize businesses… We even have some enterprises. And then cash is all about consumers; trying to give financial tools to people who are “Hey, I want to go invest in Bitcoin”, or “I want to go buy stocks”, or “I want to send money to my barber.” It really helps essentially act as a consumer banking product. And so that’s kind of where there’s a little bit of – getting both sides of the counter is kind of what we talk about.

And then we have our other brands, Tidal with streaming… And that’s kind of focused on artists, and we’re trying to figure out what ways can we enhance artists… Because they kind of operate their own business. And then we’ve got some of the more out there things, like Spiral doing Bitcoin grants, and open source Bitcoin, trying to really transform Bitcoin into the digital currency of the internet. And so yeah.

Quinn Slack: I think that a single person writing code can have a huge impact on the world… And I worry that we have lost that, or forgotten that. There were some cases where that’s been really clear, like with the creation of Bitcoin, and Ethereum… But what you see more of is people that can write code being pushed to go and build a software business, usually an enterprise software business around it… And in many ways, there have been successes, but I think there’s so many people out there that just through their code can have a huge impact on the world. And I don’t want to just have two data points from that, I want people to be able to build big businesses, and build products that tons and tons of people can use just on their own. And that happens today if you’re a writer.

If you’re a writer, you can write a book, you can write articles that have a huge impact on people. And when you do that, no one says “Hey, you should go start a publishing company.” But if you’re a coder, that’s what people tell you to. And I worry about the skill and ambition and enthusiasm we’re losing from those people, and also from all the people that say “Well, I don’t wanna get in the business. All I wanna do is code”, and knowing that that doesn’t seem possible, they don’t even get started.

[01:11:56.21] So if one impact we can have at Sourcegraph is making it so that a single coder can have a much bigger impact on the world, that would make me very happy. And certainly, I feel this as someone who loves to code, and who is now a CEO of an enterprise software business… There’s so many things I love about that too, but sometimes I think “How can that single person coding have even more distribution, even more impact? How can we celebrate that as something that someone can do for their whole life?”

Adam Stacoviak: Right. Exactly. That’s the point I’m getting to, is that it’s in a simulation, and so that’s okay. No one was hurt. But there was skills; you still upskilled. And we didn’t talk about Wilcoins; maybe potentially you’re also getting some true reward. I don’t know what you’re planning to do with the Wilcoin aspect, or… Jerod was saying “Is this Web 2 or Web 3?” Is it truly on a ledger? What is it?

Bruce Schneier: It does not make me negative Bitcoin. Bitcoin is completely stupid and useless for all sorts of other reasons. This is just an ancillary bad thing. If ransomware didn’t exist, Bitcoin would still be stupid and useless and idiotic, and we hope it dies in the fire as soon as possible.

Johan Vos: No, but there might be signs… For example, with the same quantum computer you could also trick the whole Bitcoin system and do the mining… So you would see that in the Bitcoin price, for example. Now, not to worry people, but even if we think that breaking encryption is ten years away, that is still something to worry about today.